Amongst eCommerce players, Flipkart seems to be the one that’s most moved by public petitions and socio-online movements. Much to the public relief, Flipkart had backed out of Airtel Zero platform last week and now, in a latest event Flipkart is banning some of the books on its catalogue which promote sex selection for an unborn child.

An online petition which later became a mass movement was piloted by ‘Girls Count’, an organisation working for gender equality. The petition was against Sex selection publications being sold on Flipkart and other websites.

The Supreme Court had previously ordered online search engines to remove all advertisements on sex-selection techniques, in order to bar people from turning up to the internet for ideas to conceive a boy.

India is a country with a very low sex ratio of 945 girls per 1000 boys, but the situation saddens for the age group of 0-6 years where the sex ratio comes down to 918 girls per 1000 boys.

After nearly two months of petitioning and online campaigning by various gender rights activists and organisations against the listing of literature that promoted sex selection on Indian e-commerce websites, Flipkart has moved and removed all such listings from its website. Flipkart’s removal of books written by Indian and foreign authors from its site has raised hopes that other retailers like Amazon will follow suit.

The petition was started in January and in over 2 months and with almost 12000 signatures, the effort bore results. The petition caught fire on the social networking websites and got the attention it needed.

The step against sexual discrimination of the unborn child is a must as the country still loses over 6,00,000 girls a year over it.

Regarding the banning of such books, a Flipkart spokesperson said, “All our sellers are expected to adhere to certain guidelines if they sell with us,” he added “We take strict action against sellers who attract negative feedback about their service or are found to be engaged in selling products that are fake, in violation of copyright or any other applicable laws of the land.”